Filmed by second-time director-writer Craig Zobel, this fictionalized drama compels you to bear witness to a catastrophe you see coming and you can't stop. That's hard -- harder still when you know it's based on real incidents.

You can't say, This is preposterous! Could never happen! It could. It did. It does.

But what makes "Compliance" effective isn't so much its depiction of a frightful incident as how, exactly, it came to pass. How are we led to put aside our better judgment? And what would we have done in Sandra's shoes?

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Fast-food restaurant supervisor Sandra (Ann Dowd) hears from a caller who identifies himself as a police office who tells her there's a thief among her co-workers. At the caller's request, Sandra sequesters Becky, a young, attractive counter girl, in the stockroom. Sandra can aid the investigation if she searches Becky's clothes, purse and person. Then the caller's orders grow more unorthodox. Other workers and customers are enlisted. Bad things happen to virtually everybody. Yet so calming is the caller's manner, so authoritative his demands, you see easily how much harder it would be to resist than to go along.

"The movie is driven by an urgent moral inquiry, yet it has the mesmerizing detail and humor of a very idiosyncratic fiction," New Yorker critic David Denby notes.

"I didn't detect a false note. The rhythm of the movie is workaday and unforced, the restaurant details so oddly right that you feel you understand everyone who works there."

On the op-ed page of the New York Times, Frank Bruni opined that " 'Compliance' asks questions too big -- and too relevant to a political season of grandiose persuasion and elaborate subterfuge -- to be dismissed or ignored."

The participants in the panel that will follow this one-time screening include Matt Douglas, a lead crime analyst at the Schenectady Police Department, Pat Oles, Skidmore social work professor and the former Dean of Student Affairs, and Richard Gotti, a writing and psychology professor at SUNY Empire State. Moderating this panel is Dede Hill, Albany Law School professor, formerly with the New York Attorney General's office.

"Compliance" is rated R. The Film Forum will show it at the Saratoga Arts Center at 320 Broadway on one night only at 7:30 p.m. Friday, Nov. 30.

'Judgment at Nuremberg'

The Film Forum will screen a second film dramatizing themes of authority and compliance at 3 p.m. Sunday, Dec. 2: Stanley Kramer's classic 1961 courtroom drama, "Judgment at Nuremberg," about the trial of four Nazi judges for war crimes by an American court in occupied Germany in 1948, with Spencer Tracy, Richard Widmark, Maximilian Schell, Judy Garland and Montgomery Clift.

General admission to each film is $7. Students and Film Forum members pay $5.